Paper

{
  "raw_xml": "<entry>\n    <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16397v1</id>\n    <title>Fanar 2.0: Arabic Generative AI Stack</title>\n    <updated>2026-03-17T11:35:21Z</updated>\n    <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16397v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n    <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.16397v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n    <summary>We present Fanar 2.0, the second generation of Qatar's Arabic-centric Generative AI platform. Sovereignty is a first-class design principle: every component, from data pipelines to deployment infrastructure, was designed and operated entirely at QCRI, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Fanar 2.0 is a story of resource-constrained excellence: the effort ran on 256 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, with Arabic having only ~0.5% of web data despite 400 million native speakers. Fanar 2.0 adopts a disciplined strategy of data quality over quantity, targeted continual pre-training, and model merging to achieve substantial gains within these constraints. At the core is Fanar-27B, continually pre-trained from a Gemma-3-27B backbone on a curated corpus of 120 billion high-quality tokens across three data recipes. Despite using 8x fewer pre-training tokens than Fanar 1.0, it delivers substantial benchmark improvements: Arabic knowledge (+9.1 pts), language (+7.3 pts), dialects (+3.5 pts), and English capability (+7.6 pts). Beyond the core LLM, Fanar 2.0 introduces a rich stack of new capabilities. FanarGuard is a state-of-the-art 4B bilingual moderation filter for Arabic safety and cultural alignment. The speech family Aura gains a long-form ASR model for hours-long audio. Oryx vision family adds Arabic-aware image and video understanding alongside culturally grounded image generation. An agentic tool-calling framework enables multi-step workflows. Fanar-Sadiq utilizes a multi-agent architecture for Islamic content. Fanar-Diwan provides classical Arabic poetry generation. FanarShaheen delivers LLM-powered bilingual translation. A redesigned multi-layer orchestrator coordinates all components through intent-aware routing and defense-in-depth safety validation. Taken together, Fanar 2.0 demonstrates that sovereign, resource-constrained AI development can produce systems competitive with those built at far greater scale.</summary>\n    <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.CL'/>\n    <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.AI'/>\n    <published>2026-03-17T11:35:21Z</published>\n    <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.CL'/>\n    <author>\n      <name> FANAR TEAM</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Ummar Abbas</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Mohammad Shahmeer Ahmad</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Minhaj Ahmad</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Abdulaziz Al-Homaid</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Anas Al-Nuaimi</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Enes Altinisik</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Ehsaneddin Asgari</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Sanjay Chawla</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Shammur Chowdhury</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Fahim Dalvi</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Kareem Darwish</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Nadir Durrani</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Mohamed Elfeky</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Ahmed Elmagarmid</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Mohamed Eltabakh</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Asim Ersoy</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Masoomali Fatehkia</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Mohammed Qusay Hashim</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Majd Hawasly</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Mohamed Hefeeda</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Mus'ab Husaini</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Keivin Isufaj</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Soon-Gyo Jung</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Houssam Lachemat</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Ji Kim Lucas</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Abubakr Mohamed</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Tasnim Mohiuddin</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Basel Mousi</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Hamdy Mubarak</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Ahmad Musleh</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Mourad Ouzzani</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Amin Sadeghi</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Husrev Taha Sencar</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Mohammed Shinoy</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Omar Sinan</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Yifan Zhang</name>\n    </author>\n  </entry>"
}